Trying to do something important: a couple of thoughts on ambition in a work of art

Herman Melville doesn’t announce the ambition of Moby-Dick directly. He kind of sneaks it in. It comes in late and sideways.

At the start the feeling is almost haphazard, and Ismael says, as if in afterthought, “I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery parts of the world.” It’s imagined as a minor event in “the grand programme of Providence,” a little headline lost between “Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States” and “BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN.” When the ambition is announced, it’s done almost obliquely. It’s done as if the narrator had lingered a little longer than necessary in the library, hoping somebody else would write the book so he wouldn’t have to: “As yet, however,” he says, “the sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives not complete in any literature … As no better man advances to take this matter in hand, I hereupon offer my own poor endeavors.”

It’s more admission than announcement. It’s a cautious, carefully phrased version of what Walt Whitman wrote, when Whitman, the endless self-promoter, repeatedly claims in poetry and prose, essay and interview that his goal with Leaves of Grass was to put himself and his country, a whole living person and a wide, ever-undulating democracy, into a poem. Melville’s aim is no less ambitious, to put a whole living whale into a book.

Melville isn’t quite so brash to sing of himself, though, or to equate directly himself with the country as a whole. He worries, also, that his ambition will fail, that his picture of the whale will “remain unpainted at the last.” He is always aware he’s always on the verge of the whole thing breaking down, but the ambition is there. Beating underneath. It acts as the will to will it onward, the drive to make it work, a promise to try to do something great, the stakes that are high enough to make it worth while even if the whole thing fails.

Ambition, all by itself, makes the work a thing of value.

There’s so much out there, so much art that doesn’t promise anything. That makes no claim, and no attempt at anything. We’re awash in pop and flutter, blog and clutter. It’s not that little works can’t be great, whether they’re chapbooks or minimalist novellas or graffiti, and it’s not that least important texts of an era, its disposable and mass market texts, can’t actually be really interesting, but there’s no effort, no attempt so great I should yearn for it to succeed.

There are, of course, several very legitimate critiques of such ambition-driven books, of works that weigh this much and have this size. Feminists say phallus. Freudians say ego. Both comments can be kind of true, I think. Both are fair critiques. Megaworks can have the hubris of Manifest Destiny. But ambition, even by itself, even with nothing else sustaining it, can be, for me, a source of value. The scope and scale attempted, even if it fails, means, at least, there’s an attempt at something important, to be something significant.

Put it this way: If I read a single poem and it’s no good, all I can say, I think, is it’s no good. If I read Louis Zukofsky’s “A” and I hate it, at least I can say he was trying to do something important.

I’ve tried and failed to read Zukofsky‘s 803-page, 40-year poem several times. I don’t know that I’ve even gotten to the middle, though I flipped ahead far enough I know, towards the end, it devolves (?) into musical scores. The first time I picked it up and tried to read I was in a cafe and the waitress, an older lady, asked me if the sequel was B, which basically sums up the work for me.

I mean, I know there are passages in “A” I have found moving and meaningful and riveting —

“Love speaks: ‘in wracked cities there is less action,
Sweet alyssum sometimes is not of time, now
Weep, love’s heir, rhyme not how song’s exaction
Is your distraction — related is equated
How else is love’s distance approximated.”

and,

“‘You write a strange speech.’ ‘This.'”

and,

“– Clear music —
Not calling you names, says Kay,
Poetry is not made of such things,
Music, itch according to its wrongs,
Snapped old catguts of Johan Sebastian,
Society, traduction twice over.”

— and I find it interesting how World War II breaks out in the poem, and I can tell you something at least of why people who think it’s important think it’s important —

“Lower limit speech
Upper limit music

No?”

— but I don’t know that I can argue that it is. I read it, though, and try again because of the ambition, because, even if it fails, “A” seems like it’s trying to do something serious, something important, and because it seems like it’s making, as a work, a promise to be worth while to me. It is or has the air of a grand experiment, of something that can be believed in, invested in, even as it seems to falter and fail.

Even as I struggle with Zukofsky, I find I can believe in him based even on so slight of a thing as ambition. I find myself willing myself to want this experiment to endure, to want to believe, like Lincoln at Gettysburg, to make the comparison between the work and the nation, a comparison Walt Whitman would love, that something “so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

There’s something that’s consecrating about the struggle. There’s something worthwhile about the effort even if it fails.

Which is why, and I know I’ve come here the long way round, I’m disappointed with Sufjan Stevens. This album he’s released, Age of Adz, is not a bad album. It’s not. But it marks, for Stevens, an abandonment of a project that was Whitmanian in its ambition, that was, like Leaves of Grass and Moby-Dick, an ambitious attempt to put a whole country into a work of art. There are not a lot of efforts on this scale, but Stevens, this indie musician who was known, at one point, for wearing wings in concert and signing surprisingly religious songs, started something with his “Fifty States Project.”

With Michigan, in 2003, he started a work that promised to contain a country. A map of a place that is an idea and a feeling, a vision and an angst, our home, the place half known and half remembered and misremembered, mythologized and reinterpreted, the place where we are lost.

In Illinois, in 2005, he continued that. The map moved outward and Stevens started to show us the shape of the country he felt, beautiful and strange, scary, sad and mournful. I know, for me, part of my affinity for the work was the way what it described was the home I’ve known, the country I’ve lived in — this was no Whitman ebullience, but a county of serial killers to feel sorry for, of factories as empty as suicides, cities which were once great, and this was no Melvillian pursuit of transcendence, but a country of UFOs to wonder at and miss when they’re gone, of bible studies where we pray over people with cancer but nothing happens — but besides that, ignore that, the work was a promise of scale. This work was claiming to attempt to do everything that can be done with the art form, to be big enough to be important, to try, try to take the whole scope and scale of what we know, all fifty states of our experience, and put it in a series of albums.

Stevens is free, of course, to produce what he wants to produce, and if it was a gimmick, as he’s said, then it was a gimmick. But I was willing to trust, when it was clear he was trying to do something worth doing. I was willing to engage, when there was this promise of vistas. Without that effort, that attempt at greatness, that attempt to do what Whitman did or Melville did, to get a whole man, a whole whale, a whole life or country into a work, I don’t know that I’m convinced it’s worth my attention.

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Daniel Silliman is currently writing about the biggest Bigfoot hoax of the last 100 years. He is an American Studies graduate student at the University of Tübingen in Germany, where he also teaches English grammar and academic writing. The nephew of Language poet Ron Silliman, he has a background in philosophy, worked as a crime reporter for several years, and blogs at www.danielsilliman.blogspot.com

at first it seems strange to state that ambition alone can make something great, but i think you might be onto something here. there are plenty of awful works that we study because of the ambition involved: ezra pound’s cantos come to mind. certainly we read them because pound’s other work is admirable, but it’s interesting that so much attention is given to them, even when pound himself admitted they were a failure and needed some serious editing.

funny story from the MFA program related to the cantos…chris robinson, a fellow thethe guy, was my classmate, and he decided to read the entire cantos when we were studying only parts of them. i think he did it in like one week, or something insane like that. chris is a machine. anyways, during class tom sleigh was talking about how the work had failed overall and how only an idiot would try and read all pound’s cantos. perhaps this tells us that only ambition in writing is admirable; ambition in reading…eh, not so much.

that said, i do admire stevens. i think stevens didn’t know what he was doing when he joked about doing an album for every state. then he began to take the idea seriously. then he realized it was a moby-dick. last i heard, he had become disillusioned about the album as an art form (for good reason, i think), and age of adz was an attempt to just make an album without any ambitions at all.

one last thought: the drawing for every page of moby-dick is a brilliant idea and perhaps equal to melville’s own ambition. moby-dick has been somewhat of a life reading project for me. i’ve gone through it 2 times now. i think it is the ambition of the project that draws me to it.

here’s a post i did about melville earlier. check out the pbs documentary that i link to in it. it’s great.

Some nice thoughts, but I think you totally miss the mark on Age of Adz. Age of Adz is *extremely* ambitious. In fact, I think it’s at least as ambitious as Illinois, and (dare I say) better. Steven’s is being ambitious by not finishing the project, by not churning out predictable Sufjan odes to every state.

AnonymousOctober 28, 2010, 2:21 am

i don’t think daniel’s saying adz isn’t ambitious in its own way. i think he’s just disappointed that sufjan set aside another ambitious project. besides, who says sufjan had to keep turning out predictable sufjan odes in the states project? he could have done the age of adz type music in honor of some other state. the point is less a slight to adz (after all, sufjan did seven swans in between michigan and illinoise, didn’t he? or was it enjoy your rabbit?)

Adz could totally turn out to be the best thing he ever did. It doesn’t, though, make any claims to being important, or any more significant than the 409700045 other albums that’ll come out this year. So no, the ambition is smaller. It’s self contained in “good album,” rather than trying to fit a whole country into a work.

And, no, giving up is not a form of ambition. Getting distracted is not a form of focus.

I do think Adz could have been incorporated into the project. It could have been “Arizona” or “Utah.” If you look at BQE, for example, it’s totally different than the state albums, and yet of a piece. They work together, and the state albums can be read backwards from BQE and forwards and sideways. It expands the project in an interesting and unexpected way, and yet the vision is a part of the same vision.

Part of what is interesting in longer projects is exactly the way that the project changes. Part of the drama of Zukofsy’s “A” for example, or for Pound’s Cantos, is exactly the way the project falls apart or dramatically changes as it goes along.